Excluded everything that's been mentioned here, from
https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-most-anticipated-films-of-2015That’s What I’m Talking About, which
Linklater’s referred to in the past as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused (1993). “Well, I think the word ‘spiritual’ gets me off the hook,” he told Christopher McKittrick at Creative Screenwriting a few days ago. “I just shot it and wrapped it recently, and it has nothing to do with Dazed and Confused other than it would be set four years later, when one of the younger characters went off to college. It’s a party film. It’s really about the beginning of school, not the end of the school year,” so it “overlaps with the end of Boyhood.”
Another one high on my list would be
Todd Haynes‘s Carol, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt and featuring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler. From a fan page: “A young woman in her 20s, Therese (Mara) is working in a department store and dreaming of a more fulfilling life when she meets Carol (Blanchett), an alluring woman trapped in a loveless, moneyed marriage.”
Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs with Jesse Eisenberg, Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, David Strathairn and Amy Ryan. “Plot details are vague, but we do know that Bombs centers around a war photographer’s secrets, and involves a Rashomon style structure.” Also on Ashurst’s list:
Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s
High-Rise, featuring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss. Logline: “Life for the residents of a tower block begins to run out of control.”
Xavier Dolan‘s
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, “with Kit Harrington, Jessica Chastain, Kathy Bates and Susan Sarandon joining forces to tell the tale of an American movie star caught up in controversy when his correspondence with a child actor is revealed.”
Gaspar Noé’s LoveMartin Scorsese’s Silence, a “historical drama about two priests who are persecuted for their beliefs when they travel to Japan in the 1600s.”
Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees. “Matthew McConaughey stars in this drama about an American who plans to commit suicide in Japan’s infamous forest at the base of Mount Fuji. There he meets a local man (Ken Watanabe), and together the two contemplate life.”
Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario features Emily Blunt as “an FBI agent who goes to work for the CIA to attempt to take down a Mexican drug cartel.”
Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail Caesar! Variety‘s Leo Barraclough: “Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, Alden Ehrenreich and Jonah Hill star in the film set in Hollywood in the 1950s.”
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand is Crisis. “Sandra Bullock stars in the adaptation of Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary as ‘Calamity’ Jane Bodine, a retired political consultant brought in to help an unpopular Bolivian president get re-elected.”
Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, set to premiere at the Berlinale. With Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman.
Alex Ross Perry follows up this year’s tremendous Listen Up Philip with
Queen of Earth, a psychological thriller.
Whether or not we’ll see
Michael Haneke’s Flashmob, which brings together various characters who meet via the internet, is another matter. It was revealed last summer that he was ‘waiting in line’ for the lead actress he wanted; other than that, he’s been keeping shtum.
The BBC’s Nicholas Barber: “HBO has employed 160 lawyers to scrutinize
Alex Gibney’s new documentary, but they should be finished in time for its Sundance Festival premiere in January. The reason for their caution? Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, has turned his attention to the
Church of Scientology.” Also on Barber’s list:
The Early Years, Paolo Sorrentino's second film in English with “Michael Caine and Paul Dano as a composer and a film-maker who are on holiday in the Alps. Rachel Weisz, Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda co-star.”
Thomas Vinterberg’s Thomas Hardy adaptation,
Far from the Madding Crowd, with Carey Mulligan, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge and Matthias Schoenaerts.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Umimachi Diary, adapted from Akimi Yoshida’s manga series “about four sisters sharing their late grandmother’s house.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Cemetery of Kings, which “tells of a lonesome middle-age housewife who tends a soldier with sleeping sickness and falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms, and romance.”
Yorgos Lanthimos‘s The Lobster is, as Wikipedia has it, “set in a dystopian near future where lonely people are obliged to find a matching mate within a 45-day period in a hotel. If they fail, they are transformed into animals and sent off into the woods. In that setting, one man escapes and finds love, despite the rules of the City.” With Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Léa Seydoux and John C. Reilly.
Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s The Assassin. David Bordwell: “I venture this guess: this will be a Hou film first, and a wuxia film a distant second. It will likely be a wuxia film unlike any other.”
Andrew Bujalski‘s Results. From Sundance: “Recently divorced, newly rich, and utterly miserable, Danny (Kevin Corrigan) would seem to be the perfect test subject for a definitive look at the relationship between money and happiness. Danny’s well-funded ennui is interrupted by a momentous trip to the local gym, where he meets self-styled guru/owner Trevor (Guy Pearce) and irresistibly acerbic trainer Kat (Cobie Smulders). Soon, their three lives are inextricably knotted, both professionally and personally.”
Philippe Grandrieux’s Malgré la nuit.
Philippe Garrel’s Shadow of Women (L’ombre des femmes). From Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa: “Written by the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière, Caroline Deruas and Arlette Langmann, the story revolves around Pierre and Manon, a couple of poverty-stricken documentary makers who are set to weather a storm of love and romance in modern-day Paris.” With Stanislas Merhar, Clotilde Courau and Lena Paugam. Olivier Père recently posted a report from the set.
Nanni Moretti’s Mia madre. Back in February, when the film was shooting in Rome, Screen Daily reported that Margherita Buy “plays a successful film director whose powerful on-set persona is at odds with her private self. On set, Buy’s character takes command. Back home, she is at the mercy of her ailing mother and taciturn adolescent son. John Turturro plays an American actor in a film she is shooting. Moretti is also in the cast in the role of the filmmaker’s brother.”
And from Edward Smith:
Terence Davies‘s Sunset Song. Posting the first images back in May, the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth noted that this is “an adapation of the classic Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, centering on Chris Guthrie, a farmer’s daughter who struggles to find love amidst hardship and family dysfunction, with WWI looming in the background. Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan and Kevin Guthrie feature in the film, and if it’s half as ravishing to look at and moving as Davies’ last effort, the underrated The Deep Blue Sea, we’ll be pleased.”
Andrzej Zulawski’s Cosmos. Based on the 1965 novel by
Witold Gombrowicz. With Sabine Azéma, Jean-François Balmer, Jonathan Genet, Johan Libéreau, Victória Guerra and Clémentine Pons. From the Wikipedia page on the novel: “The narrative revolves around two young men who seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.
The humor arises, as it often does in Gombrowicz’s work, in the extremity of paranoia and confusion exhibited by the protagonist.”Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure. From Stefan Dobroiu at Cineuropa: “Porumboiu wrote the screenplay, which follows two men as they face a series of misadventures in their quest to find a treasure.” With Toma Cuzin, Adrian Purcărescu and Corneliu Cozmei.
Arnaud Desplechin’s Three Memories of Childhood. At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier notes that it “revolves around Paul Dédalus, an anthropological researcher in his forties who is getting ready to go back to France. Images from his childhood start coming back to him… memories of Paris, Moscow and, above all, Roubaix.” With Mathieu Amalric and Patrick d’Assumçao.
Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann. Winfried (65) pays a spontaneous visit to his daughter, Ines (37), in Bucharest where she works as a consultant. But the two don’t get along. So Winfried transforms in to “Toni Erdmann”—crazy clothes, dyed hair, loud and jokey. The more the two go after each other, the closer they become. With Peter Simonischek, Sandra Hüller, Michael Wittenborn, Ingrid Burkhard and Ingrid Bisu.
Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. From Dark Horizons: “Isabelle Huppert stars in the story of a businesswoman playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a stalker who raped her, a crime for which she seeks revenge.”
Jia Zhangke‘s Mountains May Depart. From Variety‘s Patrick Frater: “The three-part story starts in the 1990s and involves a young couple from Shanxi Province where the young woman—to be played by Jia regular Zhao Tao—breaks his heart by marrying a rich mine owner. In the present day, the man returns to Shanxi to says his farewells and discovers his old flame divorced and estranged from her son. The final segment moves to 2025 Australia, where the son is living a meaningless existence working in a casino. The only Chinese character he is able read is ‘mother.'”
Cristi Puiu‘s Sierra Nevada. From Ioncinema‘s Eric Lavallee: “Inspired by Romanian Aurel Rau’s poem The Agathirsoi, this is about a family reunion and in the words of the filmmaker ‘a commemoration that never gets to take place… where its characters escape into fiction when overwhelmed by a grief they cannot understand.'”
Sergei Loznitsa‘s Babi Yar. Loznitsa himself, talking to Nicolas Rapold in Film Comment: “It’s about the Babi Yar massacre in 1941. I wanted to make this film in the same way I made the documentary: without any hero, with a mass of people, and just following the situation in a documentary way. To see how, slowly and gradually, people plunge into hell. Because there are already films about the Holocaust which show how it started. And nobody, or not so many people, knew how the execution of Jews started from June 1941. When Germans came into Soviet territory, they started killing Jews. And the first mass execution was in Kiev.”
Johnnie To was “shooting a musical wholly in the studio. Its source, the 2009 play
Design for Living, was written by and for the timeless Sylvia Chang Ai-chia. It won success in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland. In the film Sylvia is joined by Chow Yun-fat, thus reuniting the stars of To’s 1989 breakout film All About Ah-Long."
Justin Kurzel “took the festival success of his vicious, brilliant low-budget feature debut The Snowtown Murders and ran with it all the way to what has to be one of the most ambitious sophomore films in recent memory, a version of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth that couldn’t be more perfectly cast with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard starring. That film seems primed for a Cannes 2015 slot.”
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama “takes place in the late 18th century,” reported Geoffrey Macnab for Screen in May. “Diego de Zama, a South-American-born functionary of the colonial government, awaits a ship that should bring a royal missive avowing his promotion and transfer: the possibility to return to where his wife and children live, whom he has not seen in several years.” With Daniel Gimenez Cacho (Y tu mama también, Bad Education).
Wim Wenders‘s Everything Will Be Fine stars James Franco as “a writer who accidentally causes the death of a child while driving and spends the next 12 years examining the effect of the tragedy on his life and that of Kate, the child’s mother.” With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rachel McAdams and Marie-Josée Croze.
